The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

Now as we take a general view of Lincoln’s habit of defining in its relation to his political thought, we see that it gave him one quality in which he is unrivalled by any other American leader—the quality of perspective. The connection of the two is a necessary one. To define is to assume perspective; that is the method of definition. Since nothing can be defined until it is placed in a category and distinguished from its near relatives, it is obvious that definition involves the taking of a general view. Definition must see the thing in relation to other things, as that relation is expressible through substance, magnitude, kind, cause, effect, and other particularities. It is merely different expression to say that this is a view which transcends: perspective, detachment, and capacity to transcend are all requisites of him who would define, and we know that Lincoln evidenced these qualities quite early in life,[109] and that he employed them with consummate success when the future of the nation depended on his judgment.

Let us remember that Lincoln was a leader in the most bitter partisan trial in our history; yet within short decades after his death he had achieved sanctuary. His name is now immune against partisan rancor, and he has long ceased to be a mere sectional hero. The lesson of these facts is that greatness is found out and appreciated just as littleness is found out and scorned, and Lincoln proved his greatness through his habit of transcending and defining his objects. The American scene of his time invites the colloquial adjective “messy”—with human slavery dividing men geographically and spiritually, with a fluid frontier, and with the problems of labor and capital and of immigration already beginning to exert their pressures—but Lincoln looked at these things in perspective and refused to look at them in any other way.

For an early example of this characteristic vision of his, we may go back to the speech delivered before the Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838. The opening is significant. “In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.”[110] So Lincoln takes as his point of perspective all time, of which the Christian era is but a portion; and the entire earth, of which the United States can be viewed as a specially favored part. This habit of viewing things from an Olympian height never left him. We might cite also the opening of the Speech at Peoria, and that of the Speech at the Cooper Union Institute; but let us pass on twenty-five years and re-read the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address. “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Again tremendous perspective, suggesting almost that Lincoln was looking at the little act from some ultimate point in space and time. “Fourscore and seven years ago” carries the listener back to the beginning of the nation. “This continent” again takes the whole world into purview. “Our fathers” is an auxiliary suggestion of the continuum of time. The phrase following defines American political philosophy in the most general terms possible. The entire opening sentence, with its sustained detachment, sounds like an account of the action to be rendered at Judgment Day. It is not Abe Lincoln who is speaking the utterance, but the voice of mankind, as it were, to whom the American Civil War is but the passing vexation of a generation. And as for the “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” it takes two to make a struggle, and is there anything to indicate that the men in gray are excluded? There is nothing explicit, and therefore we may say that Lincoln looked as far ahead as he looked behind in commemorating the event of Gettysburg.

This habit of perspective led Lincoln at times to take an extraordinarily objective view of his own actions—more frequently perhaps as he neared the end of his career. It was as if he projected a view in which history was the duration, the world the stage, and himself a transitory actor upon it. Of all his utterances the Second Inaugural is in this way the most objective and remote. Its tone even seems that of an actor about to quit the stage. His self-effacement goes to the extent of impersonal constructions, so that in places Lincoln appears to be talking about another person. “At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.” “At this second appearing”! Is there any way of gathering, except from our knowledge of the total situation, who is thus appearing? Then after a generalized review of the military situation, he declares: “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.” Why “is ventured” rather than “I venture”? Lincoln had taught himself to view the war as one of God’s processes worked out through human agents, and the impersonality of tone of this last and most deeply meditative address may arise from that habit. Only once, in the modest qualifying phrase “I trust,” does the pronoun “I” appear; and the final classic paragraph is spoken in the name of “us.” There have been few men whose processes of mind so well deserve the epithet sub specie aeternitatis as Lincoln’s.

It goes without further demonstration that Lincoln transcended the passions of the war. How easy it is for a leader whose political and personal prestige are at stake to be carried along with the tide of hatred of a people at war, we have, unhappily, seen many times. No other victor in a civil conflict has conducted himself with more humanity, and this not in some fine gesture after victory was secured—although there was that too—but during the struggle, while the issue was still in doubt and maximum strain was placed upon the feelings. Without losing sight of his ultimate goal, he treated everyone with personal kindness, including people who went out of their way in attempts to wound him. And probably it was his habit of looking at things through objective definitions which kept him from confusing being logically right with being personally right. In the “Meditation on the Divine Will” he wrote, “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party....”[111] That could be written only by one who has attained the highest level of self-discipline. It explains too why he should write, in his letter to Cuthbert Bullitt: “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”[112] Lastly, there is the extraordinary confession of common guilt in the Second Inaugural Address, which, if it had been honored by the government he led, would have constituted a step without precedent in history in the achievement of reconciliation after war. It is supposable, Lincoln said, that God has given “to both North and South this terrible war.” Hardly seventy-five years later we were to see nations falling into the ancient habit of claiming exclusive right in their quarrels and even of demanding unconditional surrender. As late as February, 1865, Lincoln stood ready to negotiate, and his offer, far from requiring “unconditional surrender,” required but one condition—return of the seceded states to the Union.

There is, when we reflect upon the matter, a certain morality in clarity of thought, and the man who had learned to define with Euclid and who had kept his opponents in argument out of the excluded middle, could not be pushed into a settlement which satisfied only passion. The settlement had to be objectively right. Between his world view and his mode of argument and his response to great occasions there is a relationship so close that to speak of any one apart is to leave the exposition incomplete.

With the full career in view, there seems no reason to differ with Herndon’s judgment that Lincoln displayed a high order of “conservative statesmanship.”[113] It is true that Lincoln has been placed in almost every position, from right to left, on the political arc. Our most radical parties have put forward programs in his name; and Professor J. G. Randall has written an unconvincing book on “Lincoln the Liberal Statesman.” Such variety of estimate underlines the necessity of looking for some more satisfactory criterion by which to place the man politically. It will not do to look simply at the specific measures he has supported. If these were the standard, George Washington would have to be regarded as a great progressive; Imperial Germany would have to be regarded as liberal, or even as radical, by the token of its social reforms. It seems right to assume that a much surer index to a man’s political philosophy is his characteristic way of thinking, inevitably expressed in the type of argument he prefers. In reality, the type of argument a man chooses gives us the profoundest look we get at his principle of integration. By this method Burke, who was partial to the argument from circumstance, must be described as a liberal, whose blast against the French Revolution was, even in his own words, an attack from center against an extreme. Those who argue from consequence tend to go all out for action; they are the “radicals.” Those who prefer the argument from definition, as Lincoln did, are conservatives in the legitimate sense of the word. It is no accident that Lincoln became the founder of the greatest American conservative party, even if that party was debauched soon after his career ended. He did so because his method was that of the conservative.

The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences, of which the phenomenology of the world is a sort of continuing approximation. Or, to put this in another way, he sees it as a set of definitions which are struggling to get themselves defined in the real world. As Lincoln remarked of the Framers of the Declaration of Independence: “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”[114] This paradigm acts both as an inspiration to action and as a constraint upon over-action, since there is always a possibility of going beyond the schemata into an excess. Lincoln opposed both slavery and the Abolitionists (the Abolitionists constituted a kind of “action” party); yet he was not a middle-of-the-roader. Indeed, for one who grew up a Whig, he is astonishingly free from tendency to assume that “the truth lies somewhere in between.” The truth lay where intellect and logic found it, and he was not abashed by clearness of outline.